The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Not everyone believed it, of course. Greek and Roman traditionalists, including Plotinus’s disciples, fought back with everything they had. The Christian tide, however, proved irresistible.

  By the time Paul died around 65, Christian congregations had sprung up in every corner of the empire. There were already enough Christians in Rome to allow the emperor Nero to blame them for the Great Fire.6 A century later, Marcus Aurelius took time away from fighting barbarians and writing his Meditations to order authorities in Lyon to put to death anyone adhering to the Christian faith.

  A century after that, even as Plotinus was unraveling the secrets of Plato in his Roman villa, Christian congregations numbered in the millions. After years of fighting on Rome’s frontiers, the emperor Diocletian set up his palace at Nicomedia in 287. An old-fashioned pagan, he was horrified to see a Christian basilica sitting on the opposite hill. Sixteen years later he learned that Christians had penetrated his court, even his wife’s entourage. His savage persecutions, however, failed to diminish their numbers or their esprit de corps. Just eight years later, rivals for the imperial throne would be vying for support from the empire’s Christians, who now numbered in the millions.

  Today, historians point to social and economic factors to explain Christianity’s amazing spread. But the key factor was its skill in seizing the high ground of Greek thought, especially Plato. Other schools had their role to play. The Stoics had spoken of a brotherhood of man not very different from Paul’s vision of the brotherhood of Christians, as he very well knew.7 Aristotle’s theory of substance would come in handy when Christians had to explain how a spiritually all-powerful God could become flesh and blood and how a holy offering of bread and wine could turn into the real presence of a resurrected Jesus Christ.

  But Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato’s philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato’s shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8

  The triumph of Christianity does not mark the end of ancient philosophy, let alone a closing of the Western mind, as some critics like to claim.9 Instead, it deepened and broadened the Greek imprint on Western culture. It allowed familiar features to stand out in striking new ways. As the song has it, “Everything old is new again.” The same was true of Plato under Christianity. And that imprint was headlined, splashily enough, in the very first words of the Gospel According to St. John: “In the beginning was the Logos.”

  Logos is Greek for “word.” As far back as Heraclitus, it was used to refer to a divine essence pervading the universe: “immortal, Logos, Aeon, Father, Son, God, and justice … ruler of the universe.”10 The evangelist John, a Hellenized Jew like Paul (he was also writing in Greek, not Hebrew), made it clear that the Christian God was precisely this same Logos who had made everything in the world and is “the true light, which comes into the world to light every man.” In the same way, John said, God’s begotten son, Jesus, “who dwelt among us full of grace and truth,” was that Word, or Logos, made flesh.11

  John wasn’t the first to connect the Hebrew deity and the highest truths of the Greeks. More than fifty years earlier, a Jewish thinker from Alexandria named Philo established the same link. However, Philo then took the next leap by identifying this Logos as the offspring of Plato’s Demiurge from the Timaeus, the creative source of all being and intelligibility in the universe. Philo even said that the Logos was God’s firstborn son. It was almost certainly this Platonized Logos that John had in mind when he wrote his Gospel.12

  The consequences were huge. Anyone with an ounce of training who had read the Timaeus could see what Philo and John were up to. By using Greek philosophy to explain essential features of an alien creed like Judaism, not only were they laying out a blueprint for a Christian theology that would make sense to Greco-Roman culture. They were also offering a God who transcended the limitations and boundaries that previous thinkers, including Plato and Aristotle, had imposed on the conception of the divine.

  The result was a God who was “beyond Being,” eternal and uncreated.13 He was a God more powerful and pervasive than Plato’s Demiurge but also more actively involved in His creation than Aristotle’s Prime Mover. He had, after all, sent His son to earth as the Logos, a figure who finally reconciled the eternal split between spirit and matter, between divinity and mortality.

  This Platonized Christian God also made Plato’s Forms seem more real, as the eternal patterns existing in the mind of God out of which He built heaven, earth, and the rest of His creation. When Saint Paul wrote that “the invisible things of God” are to be understood through “the visible things that are made,” his words struck home with every reader of dialogues like the Timaeus and the Meno. Christianity also offered a hereafter, in which every soul would be judged according to its merits, just as Plato related in his Republic: except that the judges were not mythic figures from a shadowy pagan underworld, but the awesome team of Father and Son and Their heavenly angels.

  The similiarity to Plotinus and his Neoplatonic mysticism was even more striking. Christianity offered a God who drew together all life and diversity as One just as Plotinus insisted, not simply in a series of ever-diminishing spiritual emanations, but in a single swift decisive moment, through the incarnation as Christ. Another never-to-be-repeated moment in the future, the Second Coming, would then fulfill that creation’s entire destiny, including man’s resurrection (which Saint Augustine in his City of God asserted that Plato would have endorsed if he had ever heard the Gospels).14

  No more pointless repetitive cycles, no more meaningless drift, no more dreams of nothingness. Instead, at the Second Coming Christians shall see “the invisible things of the world” as they really are; “we shall see the material forms of the new heaven and the new earth,” Augustine says, “and see God present everywhere.…”15 There will God be in His final glory, “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last,” along with the souls of His servants, “for the Lord God giveth them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.”16

  It was a grandiose vision, breathtaking in its comprehension and scope. So while Judaism and the Bible gave Christianity its weight and matter, its flesh and blood, Plato and Neoplatonism became its conceptual spine.

  For example, just as Plotinus’s God came in three emanations—the transcendent Godhead or One; the Divine Intellect, or Nous; and the World Soul—so Christianity ended up with its Holy Trinity, with God the Father bringing forth his Son, or Logos, who in turn draws together the divine essence in all things through the Holy Spirit. Likewise, Christianity revealed an individual human soul as immortal as Plato’s and with the same yearning for truth. However, this soul did not appear in the world as an unhappy prisoner, “chained hand and foot in the body” just as Socrates’s had been.17 On the contrary, by living in the here and now, by sharing in the goodness of the Lord’s creation and obeying His commandments, Paul and his successors insisted the soul is able to realize its destiny through union with Christ.

  As for Holy Scripture, the Bible was the Logos in the truest sense, the Word of God set forth “in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,” John the Evangelist wrote. “So believing, you will have life in His name”—along with that final wisdom generations of philosophers had sought in vain.18

  For the Lord’s message was not just for the lovers of wisdom, but for all mankind. Christianity put what had been the privilege of the few within the grasp of everyone, even those who lived beyond the pale of empire. “Thanks to the Logos, the whole world is now Greece and Rome.”19

  Those words were written around 170, little more than a century after the apostles Paul and Peter were martyred. They reflect the growing confidence among Christians that the cultural tide had already decisively turned in their favor. Earlier Christian leaders, including both Paul and Peter, had endured scorn, persecution, and martyrdom
(in a few decades, they would endure them again). Their early converts had tended to be people on the margins of Greco-Roman society, the socially or economically displaced or those, like women and slaves, who were seen as devoid of the virtues necessary for true culture (paideia in Greek), but who could find a path to fulfillment through a belief in Christ.

  Clement, by contrast, came from a well-to-do Athenian family. He was as much at home with his society and culture as an Ivy League graduate. He had come to the great intellectual talking shop in Alexandria early in the reign of Marcus Aurelius to study and learn, but in a specifically Christian context. To Clement and his generation, Christianity was not the enemy of philosophy, but its finest and last expression.

  Its doctrines, and the teachings of Jesus in particular, were in Clement’s mind the perfect summing up of all the doctrines about nature, justice, and truth that Plato had laid out. Hadn’t Socrates taught there was one God, and hadn’t he been persecuted for his beliefs, just as Christians were?20 The wisdom Socrates had brought to the Greeks, Clement asserted, Jesus had brought to the Jews and other barbarians. In fact, Socrates and Jesus were spiritual brothers. Just as Plato and Aristotle founded schools to teach disciples, so now Christ was the new “schoolmaster” of the human race. In fact, mosaics and statues of the time even showed Christ as the Great Teacher, seated on his teacher’s chair, or cathedra, as if he were a professor at the Academy itself, surrounded by well-groomed students.

  For Clement and the other so-called Christian Apologists of the third century, the future was a win-win situation. Old Testament Judaism and Greek philosophy had come to flow into the same great river, Christianity. The wisdom Plato and Aristotle had been forced to search for on their own could now be brought unmediated to the followers of Christ. The great search for wisdom and truth on which Plato had set the ancient world was finally at an end.

  Not everyone, however, bought the formula. Traditional Platonists found themselves like MIT graduates being confronted by people who claim to have learned plasma physics taking an Internet class over the summer. They were furious about what was happening and fought back hard.

  Plotinus’s students in particular were outraged at this vulgarization of Plato and their master.21 One was a Greek writing during Clement’s lifetime who composed the most damaging of all attacks on Christianity, then or since. His name was Celsus, and he titled his work (in Greek) The True Logos—a direct challenge to the Christianized Logos of his opponents.

  Celsus ripped aside the veil of intellectual respectability Christian Apologists had tried to give their faith. He gleefully exposed its roots in a Judaism that most Romans and Greeks despised and proved that Christianity had little or nothing in common with the elitist philosophy of Plato. The whole idea of a poor Jewish boy being the son of God was ridiculous. “Did not Plato say that the Architect and Father of the universe is not easily found?” How likely would it be that His son would turn up in a despised corner of the world like Galilee?

  Celsus also rebuked the Christian claim that God’s return was imminent. “God would never come down to earth to judge mankind. Why would he do this? He already knows all things.”22 He mocked a faith that turned followers into cannibals by insisting that they eat the body and blood of their god, and a faith that actually celebrated the god’s death as a common criminal. Plato’s God had been the epitome of refined reason. This Christian deity was clearly fit only for the gutter.

  It was time for Christians to put aside their vain illusions, Celsus concluded. The vagabond and charlatan who called himself Messiah had only led his followers to disaster. He promised them prosperity and dominion over the world, “and yet,” Celsus sneered, “you do not have one yard of ground to call your own.” How could such a misbegotten mob possibly claim to be Plato’s heirs?

  Celsus’s attacks were so stinging and devastating that they went unanswered for nearly a century. Even Clement of Alexandria felt inadequate to the task. Instead, it fell to Clement’s most famous pupil to take up the cudgels on behalf of Christianity and to use Plato to stand Celsus’s arguments on their head.

  He was born around 185 in Alexandria to a Greek father and Egyptian mother, who named him Origen, meaning “the son of Horus.” He was built like a boxer or wrestler, with an aggressive personality to match. This earned him the nickname of “The Untamed.”23 He brought the same reckless quality to his Christianity. In fact, Origen was so self-assertive and so clearly gifted that he took over Clement’s school of theology at age eighteen when the older scholar left.

  Plotinus’s student Porphyry once said that Origen “lived like a Christian but thought like a Greek.”24 In fact, Origen was steeped in Plato: in Alexandria, he and Plotinus shared the same teacher, the great Platonist Ammonius Saccas. As a result, Origen brought the fusion of Christianity and Platonism to an entirely new level—one could say a more urgent level. More than any other thinker before him, Origen used a Platonized Christianity to address the pressing issues of his age. In doing so, he permanently shaped its character in ways that only one other Church Father, St. Augustine, would begin to match.

  Unlike his rival Plotinus, Origen could not shut himself off from the world. Nor could he be complacent about it. Like his teacher Clement, he had felt its cruelty firsthand. When he was seventeen, Origen had watched his father being dragged through the streets to be executed for his Christian faith in one of the periodic pogroms pagan officials were beginning to use to intimidate their Christian rivals. His father and other Christian prisoners were put into a building near the city’s necropolis for a time, then moved into the temple of the pagan god Serapis, where a cheering, jeering mob had gathered. Origen managed to squeeze into the crowd unobserved, and there, in the fading dusk, he saw his father being beheaded. Then the executioners threw the body to one side, next to the other bodies, and in the torchlight made a hideous pyramid out of the severed heads.25

  A man “should take each moment and hold it tenderly in his hands,” Origen later wrote, in order “to examine what other possible meaning it may hold, what other purpose or end.” His father’s martyrdom became the defining moment in Origen’s life. In fact, he would spend his life facing the same fate from Roman persecutors—in effect, with a death sentence hanging over his head.26

  This led him to ask a question: If I were to die tomorrow, and had to stand before my God for judgment, what would I say to Him? Socrates had said that the unexamined life was not worth living. The same was true for Origen and, he believed, for every Christian.27 The task of Christianity had to be to prepare believers for that awful moment and to show them how to live a life that reflected the light of divine truth in every aspect.

  Origen was the first Christian thinker to make the conscience, Socrates’s daimon, or inner voice, the focus of moral life. For Origen, the conscience is all that separates the human being from the savage beasts who lynched his father. His teacher Clement had praised the ancient Stoic virtue of apatheia, emotional detachment. Origen never does.28 If Christianity was to have any larger meaning in the lives of the faithful, Origen believed, it had to cultivate that inner conscience, to make it the guide all our dealings with the world and others. By combining Plato’s thymos, that sense of moral outrage, with the teachings of Jesus, Christianity could scour away the cruelty and savagery of the age.

  Today, we are vaguely if uncomfortably aware of that side of Roman life. We see movies like Gladiator about the bloody spectacles of the Colosseum and read about how Nero had Christians torn apart in the arena by wild dogs for the delight of the crowds or “made into torches to be ignited after dark.” The sexual and moral license of the empire’s elite has been portrayed ad nauseam in Hollywood’s images of Roman orgies.

  But the reality was far more brutal. Roman arenas that are still standing, like the Colosseum and the ones in Arles and Verona, were settings for a daily bloodbath. From Spain to Antioch, the mass murder of prisoners and thousands of caged animals was standard public fare. In Roman homes,
slaves and children were considered nonpersons. Their physical and sexual abuse, including castration, was accepted without question, as was the abuse of women. Exposing unwanted children and infanticide were commonplace—so much so that scholars speculate infanticide may have helped to doom Rome’s population and prosperity to permanent decline.

  At the same time, the empire’s leisure class celebrated a sexual adventurism that knew no limits and spared no one in its taste for the bizarre, running the gamut from prostitution and homosexuality to incest, bestiality, and child sodomy, “a vicious cycle of agitation, quest, satiation, exhaustion, ennui.”† As for Rome’s governing institutions, its prisons were nonstop horrors, where men accused of plotting against the emperor or of using witchcraft, or taxpayers who no longer had the money to pay (taxes under Diocletian routinely took one-third to one-half of gross income), were routinely tortured to death. If they were of low birth, they would be roasted over a slow fire—as were, of course, Christians.29

  As Origen pointed out, the wise man as defined by Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers would never participate in any of these horrors. Like Socrates, he would avoid inflicting pain on any living thing; prefer suffering wrong rather than doing wrong to others; and avoid the gross temptations of sexual license. Like Seneca, he would turn away from the blood theater of the games in disgust. Like Plotinus, he would proclaim the sanctity of all life, including animals, and keep his soul pure until his dying day.

  The same was true of the first Christians, Origen pointed out; and the people whom Celsus affected to despise most, the Jews. “The Jewish people never found delight purely in games,” Origen wrote, “or the theater, or horse races. Their women never sold their beauty.… They always believed in the immortality of the soul, and are indeed wiser than those philosophers who, after their most learned utterances, continually fall back upon the worship of idols and demons.”